iOS 6.1 update without Maps overhaul

We have some good news for iOS owners and the news you have been waiting to hear for a long time. Earlier this week Apple released beta 5 of iOS 6, but just hours ago Apple has now gone live with a full iOS 6.1 software update that is ready for public download. If you were expecting to see a full revamp of the criticized Maps application though, you are in for a disappointment.

If you go to the settings menu of your iOS device, you’ll see that the iOS 6.1 update is now ready to install OTA and weighs in at 78.7MB. Before you go ahead and update, you can see the changelog that Apple has posted, but unfortunately the changes are very minimal it has to be said.

One of the key changes in the new update is that LTE support has been extended to reach more carriers. As we told you earlier this week with the release of iOS 6.1 beta 5, movie ticket purchasing with Fandango is now available when using the Siri application. Other than that – there is nothing else to get excited about, but more importantly perhaps – no major changes to the Maps application.

It’s fair to say that a lot of iOS 6 users have now switched to Google Maps as their default mapping software, as it seems like Apple still needs more time to get their Maps app working as intended. At the moment, accuracy of searches are still not perfect and consumers are having a lot more success when using Google’s Maps software instead.

Tim Cook famously said that their Maps app is below par at the moment, so you should at least know that changes will be coming eventually. It hasn’t happened in iOS 6.1 though so let’s hope that iOS 6.2 will give consumers the overhaul that it badly needs.

Are you surprised to see that there has been no major improvements to Apple Maps on iOS 6.1, considering that many have now switched to Google Maps?

Who said the changes have to be client-side? One of the well-published caveats with Apple’s Maps application was when viewing places like the Eiffel Tower in 3D mode, users were presented with a flat image. Problems like this aren’t going to be solved by an updated client, but rather an updated dataset on the server.

Danny Dodge

Basically – if you have anything other than certain versions of the latest model, in my case the iPhone 4s and iPad 3, you get a full point update that changes your music player theme in the lock screen.
In contrast the S3 when upgrading from 4.1.1 to 4.1.2, not even a poibt upgrade but a point-point one, it got more new features than the jump from iOS 5 to iOS 6…
I wish Apple would sort themselves out a bit and take these updates seriously – users are screaming for certain new features and are repeatedly being ignored. So glad that the jailbreak will be available again to add some Android flavour to iOS.